Wooden
ShipsA Generic Age of Sail Play Aid

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This is another generic gamebox, which hopefully recreates enough of
an era (like Minute Napoleonics) for the fledgling designer to get started with.
Wooden Ships started out as a desire to create a gamebox for Wooden Ships and Iron Men,
the Avalon Hill Game. Howver, I also own Close Action, the excellent game on the
same subject by Clash of Arms. I was struck with the fact that while there are many
differences between the two games, there are still many similarities as well. So I
decided to make this a GENERIC gamebox that could be used both for WS&IM and CA, and
perhaps HEART OF OAK (FGU) as well.

Note Bene: This gamebox is FAR from complete.
A complete gamebox would have every ship from every
scenario from every Age of Sail game... and I don't have that kind of time on my
hands! What I have done is create a gamebox with sample ships from major
nautical powers of the day: UK, US, France, Spain, Russia, and Turkey. You may feel
free to alter the gamebox for your own scenarios... that's what it is designed for you to
do. You will notice that the top three ships in the Image Tile groups for the major
nations are blanks. These are blanks for Ships of the Line, Medium to Small ships,
and Small ships. To create your own ships, Simply bring up the gamebox in Designer:

1) Select the Tile Image Group for the particular nation you want to create a ship for.

2) Clone the large, medium or small ship image.

3) Type the number of guns under the flag

4) Rotate the tile 90 Degrees.

5) Type the NAME OF THE SHIP. I've been using ARIAL, SIZE 7, PLAIN.

6) Rotate the tile 270 Degrees. Save.

7) If you develop a bunch of new ships, please save them out as a tile library (GTL) and send them to me.

NOTICE: This Gamebox is created using Dale Larson's excellent
Play By Email utility, Cyberboard (the poor man's Aide De
Camp!)

The Action

This screen shot demonstrates the single scenario included in this
gamebox, RANGER Vs. DRAKE, WS&IM Scenario 2. The Wind Direction marker, Speed
and Rate of Change are indicated on the map above.

This is an example of a ship chart from the gamebox.
In the scenario being indicated here, the ship has taken 3 hull hits, 2 sailor crew
hits, three marine hits, and 3 rigging hits. The Ship is loading round shot on the
Port side, Chain on the Starboard, and is under Full Sail.

This is an example of the movement plot chart, which is
common to both CA and WSIM (with some divergences...). There are little markers to
indicate what either captain desires to do with his ship in the marker section.